By JAY AMBROSE, Scripps Howard News Service

Over at lowbrow MSNBC, the jokes about tea parties have been lewd and crude. Some other commentators think such protests are just stupid. And the federal government has been worrying about right-wing extremists.

President Barack Obama is expanding federal powers left and right, eyeing yet other enlargements and still more billions in spending, and it shouldn't strike anyone as utterly senseless that Gov. Rick Perry of Texas should say enough, stop, quit it.

Degeneracy -- is that what it is, everything becoming worse than it was?
No, it couldn't be -- the good old days had many bad old ways now vanished, and pluses of certain kinds multiply. Still, evidence of decay is all around us, as in making a phone call to a business or governmental bureaucracy and having Hal answer.

You write columns, you get e-mails, and what some tell you is that capitalism is a failure, that people are suffering and what we need is Obama-style socialism -- virtually unfettered government taking over everything that moves and spending at a rate that could add something like $9 trillion to our debt over the next decade.

Because Democrats abandoned a plan to use a Senate squelch-the-minority maneuver to pass a disastrous cap-and-trade carbon tax, the idea may be done for this year. But don't give thanks too quickly.

President Obama's health plan is a conglomeration of ridiculous costs, unacceptable risks and ideologically inspired deception that starts with the mantra repeated by many that there are 46 million Americans who can't get health care.

The Barack Obama administration has proven to be a gasp a minute, whether there's some new, dictatorial scheme in the works or the gravitas-challenged treasury secretary is blithely talking about abandoning the dollar as the world's chief reserve currency.

On top of all its other misdeeds, the Obama administration is now figuring out an authoritarian means to seize American companies, and what we don't need is Republicans saying yup, yup, bickering among themselves or hiding in the weeds.

Back in 1500, we learn from a Princeton professor, the Aztecs figured the climate debate was over, and that if you wanted rain and sunshine and other such blessings, it was simple enough what you had to do -- sacrifice 20,000 lives a year to the right gods.

Long-time Washington hands conclude the public honeymoon is over for President Obama, and I guess so -- look at the "tea parties" as angry citizens protest his policies, carrying signs that says such things as, "Honk if I am paying your mortgage."